Filmmaker Frank Capra (1897-1991) was 1930s Hollywood's top director, creating several immensely popular movies that captured the mood of the Depression-era United States and earning more Academy Award nominations than any of his contemporaries....

Director, writer, and producer Frank Capra, who made over fifty movies in a career spanning almost four decades, is best remembered for showcasing the virtues of ordinary people in sentimental human comedies, films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,...

Born May 18, 1897 Bisacquino, Sicily Died September 3, 1991 La Quinta, California Film...

Although he is one of the most successful and popular directors of all time, Frank Capra is seldom mentioned as one of Hollywood's great film auteurs. During his peak, as well as in the years that followed, critics referred to his work as...

Frank Capra (18 May 1897 – 3 September 1991) was an Academy Award winning Italian-American film director and a major creative force behind a number of highly popular films of the 1930s and 1940s, including It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes...

The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 09-05-1991 FRANK CAPRA Date: 09-05-1991, Thursday Section: OPINION Edition: All Editions -- Four Star B, Three Star P, Two Star, One Star Biographical: FRANK CAPRA IF he had made no movie other than "It's a Wonderful Life,"...

...

Frank Capra Jr., a producer who helped build a major television and movie studio and whose father directed the Christmas classic "It's A Wonderful Life," has died. He was 73.Capra Jr. died Wednesday night at a hospital in Philadelphia, said Bill Vassar, the executive vice...

Director David O. Russell has become known for arousing actors’ ire—George Clooney’s alleged fisticuffs on the Three Kings set; Lily Tomlin’s widely circulated outbursts during the filming of I ❤ Huckabees—but at the Ghetto Film School’s annual spring benefit dinner at Bottino in Chelsea on...

The unique Capra genre has been defined by Richard Griffith, the film historian, as the "fantasy of goodwill," and he has also described its archetypical pattern. "In each film, a messianic innocent, not unlike the classic simpletons of literature … pits himself against the forces of entrenched greed. His inexperience defeats him strategically, but his gallant integrity in the face of temptation calls forth the goodwill of the 'little people,' and through their comb...

As a general rule, comedy attends to and reflects upon human desires for love, life, and fertility. Comic plots emphasize sequences of reversal and recovery that in turn reflect mythological sequences of death and rebirth…. Elements of the miraculous, the wonderful, and the fantastic are found in all comedies. Shakespeare's comedies abound with fantastic characters and situations….

American Madness, [Capra's] film about an idealistic banker, is one of the finest American movies to emerge from the early years of the Depression. Very little in Capra's early career as a director suggested he was capable of creating a film as sharp in its social observation and as ambitious in its analysis of American values as this melodrama about robbery, murder, a bank panic, and the conflict between social responsibility and greed. (p. 57) There is a good deal of "business"...